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The Highway of Death

Twenty
five years ago, one of the most brutal massacres in war history
occurred in Iraq, along Highway 80, about 32 km west of Kuwait city.

On the
night of February 26–27, 1991, thousands of Iraqi soldiers and
civilians were retreating to Baghdad, after a ceasefire was
announced, when President George Bush ordered his forces to slaughter
the retreating Iraqi army. Fighter planes of the coalition forces
swooped down upon the unarmed convoy and disabled the vehicles in the
front, and at the rear, so that they couldn’t escape.

Then
wave after wave of aircraft pounded the trapped vehicles for hours on
end. After the carnage was over, some 2,000 mangled Iraqi vehicles,
and charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi
soldiers lay for miles along what came to be known as the “Highway
of Death”. Several hundred more littered along another road,
Highway 8, that leads to Basra. The scenes of devastation on these
two roads became some of the most recognizable images of the Gulf
War.

The day
before, Baghdad had radio announced that Iraq's Foreign Minister had
accepted the Soviet ceasefire proposal and had ordered all Iraqi
troops to withdraw from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660.
President Bush, however, had refused to believe it and had responded
that "there was no evidence to suggest the Iraqi army is
withdrawing. In fact, Iraqi units are continuing to fight. . . We
continue to prosecute the war."

The next
day, the Iraqi President had himself announced over the radio that
the withdraw had indeed begun on two highways and would be completed
that day, to which Bush had reacted calling Hussein's announcement
"an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."

Rather
than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave the field of
battle, thereby risking a settlement that might not be favorable to
the United States, Bush and the U.S. military strategists decided
simply to kill as many Iraqis as they possibly could.

The
bombing started near midnight. At first US and Canadian jets bombed
the front and rear ends of the convoy to prevent it from moving
forward or back, then attacked the trapped convoy by repeated
bombing. The Commander-in-Chief of the United States Central Command
had received instruction from Bush administration to "not to
let anybody or anything out of Kuwait City." Consequently,
any vehicle that diverted off of the highway was tracked, hunted and
destroyed individually. Even disarmed Iraqi soldiers who surrendered
were mowed down by gunfire. Not one Iraqi survived.

“The
cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the
ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not.
Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to
shrapnel,” wrote Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac.

“The
massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva
Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of
soldiers who are out of combat,” wrote Joyce Chediac. “The
Iraqi troops were not being driven out of Kuwait by U.S. troops as
the Bush administration maintains. They were not retreating in order
to regroup and fight again. In fact, they were withdrawing, they were
going home.”

“To
attack the soldiers returning home under these circumstances is a war
crime,” Chediac added.

"Even
in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic,"
said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer.

“The
most disturbing aspect of the incident was the secrecy involved,”
wrote Malcom Lagauche. “When Newsday broke the story, many were
taken by surprise. According to members of the U.S. House and Senate
Armed Forces Committees, the Pentagon had withheld details of the
assault from the committees.”

The
media was also given a different story. U.S. field commanders tried
to portray that Iraqi forces were not voluntarily withdrawing but
were being pushed from the battlefield.

Four
years later, General Norman Schwarzkopf tried to justify what had
happened on the Highway of Death: “The first reason why we
bombed the highway coming north out of Kuwait is because there was a
great deal of military equipment on that highway, and I had given
orders to all my commanders that I wanted every piece of Iraqi
equipment that we possibly could destroy. Secondly, this was not a
bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across
the border to Iraq. This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs
who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying
to get out of the country before they were caught.”

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